Many Muslims despise western cultures for our decadence, and with some reason. By decadence I mean a decline in morality and culture. They see in us moral equivocation, infirmity of purpose and a general lack of courage. However, what is truly decadent is that for many years there have been repeated cases — well known to police, social workers, charities and court reporters — of young men of Pakistani origin grooming and pimping hundreds of very young white girls. These have been hushed up in a conspiracy of silence. Even when shocking convictions have been reported, silence has prevailed. The reason is, quite simply, fear of causing ethnic offence.

Almost alone, the heroic Ann Cryer, formerly MP for Keighley, near Bradford, has bravely talked about this since 2003 only to be met by denial all round. Until her protests, Bradford police had said there was nothing they could do, and local Muslim elders said the problem was nothing to do with them and was probably the fault of the girls themselves. Yet if such terrible crimes had been systematically committed by white men against underage Asian Muslim girls, public outrage among the white majority here would have been almost hysterical.

The silence surrounding the sexual crimes of British Pakistani Muslims against hundreds of white teenage girls is reverse racism — racism against one’s own kind, a particularly pusillanimous form of decadence. Who, in their guilty, anti-racist zeal, cared about those young white girls whose lives were being ruined? Now, after an investigation by The Times, our sister paper, the facts can no longer be ignored. Since 1997, in 17 court cases involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11-16 by groups of males, 56 men have been convicted of crimes including rape, child abduction and sex with a child. This involves hundreds of prostituted girls, some as young as 13. Of the men found guilty, 50 were Muslims, mostly of Pakistani descent.

Detective chief inspector Alan Edwards of West Mercia police has called for an end to the “damaging taboo” surrounding these crimes. “These girls are being passed around as meat … but everyone’s too scared to address the ethnicity factor. No one wants to stand up and say that Pakistani guys in some parts of the country are recruiting young white girls and passing them around their relatives for sex.” Other police sources said that those convicted represented only a small proportion of a “tidal wave” of organised crimes in some cities.

The Home Office said that it had no plans to commission research into the ethnic and cultural background of sex criminals. But someone should, because this is precisely a cultural issue. There are sacred cows involved — western liberal sacred cows as well as sacred cows from Muslim cultures — and they should rapidly be slaughtered.

Among young Muslim men from backward rural Asian cultures, there is a tendency to regard white girls as silly slappers who deserve no better. In the Netherlands, which has a similar problem, the researcher Linda Terpstra says that these men have “absolutely no respect for women”. She says pimps would ask what it mattered if a girl had sex with a few men or a hundred: “Either way she’s a whore. Women should be virgins when you marry them. Girls here are all whores.”

Combined with this contempt and the insistence on virginity is the sexual frustration caused by long-range arranged marriages. According to Cryer and to various Muslims I have spoken to, an arranged marriage to a girl from a backward village in Kashmir or Pakistan, who is probably illiterate and will have nothing in common with a young British boy, causes sexual and emotional frustration among young men.

Longing for sex, it’s easy through their eyes to see western girls, with microskirts and skimpy tops, as easy meat, a word constantly used by people talking about this. Good Muslim girls cover their entire bodies and sometimes their faces, too. Western slags, unchaperoned and dressed like jailbait, might seem the rightful prey of pimps. Islam does not condone such crimes, but in all its forms it is censorious of immodesty and sexual freedom in women. Islam teaches such women are unworthy of respect; under sharia law they would be severely punished.

However, if many Muslims have taken such attitudes to extremes, western culture has taken immodesty and sexual incontinence to almost equally astonishing excesses. It has been a huge disappointment to me that feminism has degenerated into extreme sexual licence. Tiny children are hypersexualised, and young girls now boast proudly of “shagging” — a word I associated at their age only with sheep. It is commonplace in some city centres to see young women stumbling about with their breasts bursting out of their tight dresses, screeching, vomiting and falling down.

We should have seen it coming with Germaine Greer, the women’s liberation goddess of my youth. Of course, she was right, along with anthropologists, to see enforced virginity and extreme modesty as tools of male repression and control. But was she right in the late 1960s to celebrate promiscuity, and pose naked in the underground magazine Suck? Was it for that freedom that feminists endured force-feeding in prison? Around that time Oz magazine had a front-page headline announcing that “All God’s children got de clap”. That was true, with the infertility and chronic illness that followed; it was hardly liberation, but a consequence of a supposed liberation that had degenerated into licence and licentiousness; in its modern forms it has made us all unhappy and despicable. If many Muslims are very disappointed by the extremists among them so too are many western women by the feminists among them.

Little perhaps can be done about such great cultural differences. But it would surely be right to slaughter the following sacred cows. First, the curious western belief that it’s better to have double standards and injustice than to criticise another culture. Second, the insistence of western women that they have an incontrovertible right to dress like hypersexualised jailbait, regardless of its effects. Third, the insistence of some cultures on their right to arranged marriages across continents, regardless of their antisocial consequences here. And finally, the assumption of multiculturalism that all cultures, in all their manifestations, have a right to equal respect. This might perhaps help in the struggle against our own decadence.